One good day, one miserable one this weekend.  Saturday was good, culminating in a superb dinner at Topeka's best restaurant.  My old colleague and friend Virginia took the recently retired Mo (as in Maureen), our British Shakespeare teacher for the last dozen years, her husband Dick, my Mo, and me out for a very early birthday dinner.  Mo and I have birthdays in mid-July, but she and Dick are leaving tomorrow for a summer in Seattle, so the celebration was five weeks early.  It's been a long time since Topeka had a first-rate restaurant.  During the 1980s, we had an authentic French restaurant, La Picardie, but it closed nearly thirty years ago.  The Rowhouse is a very special restaurant: it's open only four nights a week; its menu changes every week; many of the herbs and greens are grown in its own garden; and they have a tasting menu of small portions of all dishes on the small menu.  The dinner was as good as always, and the company lively (my favorite adjective).

After driving home in a pouring rain (in our newly washed car), I discovered that Vittoria de Sica's classic neo-realist movie "Two Women," starring Sophia Loren, was on TMC.  Loren gives a brilliant performance as a tough store owner, fleeing Rome in the confused last days of WWII and trying to protect her teenage daughter.  It's a gritty portrayal of wartime conditions and of the day-to-day struggle of village people, who have no particular stake in the war except finding food and staying alive.  Loren succeeds in survival and protection for ninety of the hundred minutes of the film.  But in the last few minutes, having taken refuge in a nearly destroyed church, mother and daughter are raped by retreating Moroccan (fighting on the side of the Italians) soldiers. 

Starting at about 3 a.m. Sunday, however, the happy evening went south and stayed there for the next 36 hours.  After an often interrupted sleep, I could hardly wake up yesterday morning, sleeping till after 9 a.m., the latest I can remember in many years.  Many Imodiums later, we went out for a late lunch with a friend.  But halfway through the lunch, the black curtain descended: I couldn't eat and could barely stay awake.  All I wanted was to be in bed, and once there I slept the afternoon away--three hours of oblivion.  I managed to stay awake for the rest of the evening, but between cramps and bathroom runs (so to speak), I couldn't eat and sat in my corner of the couch, quiet except for frequent groaning noises.  After two years of these, Mohamed remains patient.  I'm not sure I'd be so gracious.

For the past two years, I've been on the same chemo schedule.  Every day with my morning batch of pills, I take the chemo.  Then I wait for an hour before I can eat anything.  And then I know that three to four hours later, I'm going to crash, a preliminary to the longer afternoon sleep.  After thinking about it many times, but letting inertia keep me on the same schedule, I've decided to shift and take the chemo before bed.  I have to wait at least two hours after eating before taking it, but perhaps the sudden needs for sleep will actually occur during the night.  If so, I'm going to feel pretty silly that I've spent two years following the same routine.